Seedcamp London has drawn to a close today by selecting a record 11 teams to join the micro-seed investment and mentoring program from a possible 18.
In some sense the most important day of the week for startups attending Seedcamp London, the investor day is when they get to pitch their ideas to angels and VCs in the hope of garnering investment interest. It’s also the day they find out if they have been accepted into Seedcamp’s program.
With 11 successful teams this time around, it’s the first time that Seedcamp has accepted more startups from one intake than were rejected. In total there were 18 new teams present (some of those pitching were already a part of Seedcamp but are seeking funding) and one that couldn’t make it due to visa issues.
So, in no particular order, the 11 winning teams:
Spreddit
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Spreddit is a startup looking to make paying for expensive items online more accessible, but without signing up for pricey interest-added store cards or similar.
Right now, Spreddit picks popular products from well-known brands (mostly fashion, but if you wanted a MacBook, that’s there too) and offers customers the option to pay for them in three instalments without paying any interest.
What happens is that customers buy goods as they would normally and Spreddit fronts two-thirds of the up-front cost (one-third is paid at checkout) and then subsequent instalments are taken for the following two months. Spreddit makes its revenues by charging the retailer a small percentage of the sale for being featured on its site and made its first sale this week.
In future, Spreddit wants to have its payment option embedded directly within retail sites to drive more sales using the deferred payment option.
Currently, Spreddit customers need to be UK residents with a UK bank account.
➤ Spreddit
Legal Tender
Legal Tender is, essentially, a marketplace for legal work looking to cut-down on the amount of money businesses spend by finding exactly the right firm for the job.
Currently, businesses often use one law firm for all of their work, whether they are specialists in that particular area or not, Nicholas d’Adhemar, explained.
Clearly aimed at businesses, Legal Tender, is free to use for the end-user and makes its revenues by charging 4 percent of the fee for any work carried out by a law firm using its platform.
GoPixel
GoPixel, formerly known as Pinster, is an analytics and marketing suite for visual social networks, currently focussing specifically on Pinterest, GoPixel hopes to extend its skills to other networks like Fancy in the future.
It provides brands and marketeers with a full analytics dashboard and specific campaign management tools for planning and execution rather than just measuring reach and effectiveness. In doing this, GoPixel says it can provide ROI measures and actionable suggestions based on the data.
Plans range from $20 per account, per month up to a custom structure for larger customers.
➤ GoPixel
Share LaTeX
Not every startup can focus their efforts on creating new photo filters or analytics suites (thank goodness) and Share LaTex is one UK-based startup with the task of becoming the go-to collaboration platform for academics. A Google Docs for science, if you will.
You see, academics aren’t like you and I. Particularly in the field of science, documents aren’t prepared using Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Instead, it uses a a document markup language and preparations system called LaTeX; which also hedlps make all the scientific formulas look all pretty, too.
However, while pretty formulas aren’t to be sniffed at, nor is real-time collaboration on documents – something tht LaTeX doesn’t support in its own right.
Enter Share LaTeX which provides exactly this – a platform for real-time collaboration on LaTeX documents. Share LaTeX is already up and running and has 70,000 users generating early revenue f0r the company. Which also isn’t to be sniffed at.
Teddy The Guardian
Croatian startup IDerma’s Teddy The Guardian project was the only team in the room with a physical product, but one that had digital smarts.
Simply, Teddy The Guardian is like a regular teddy you might give to your kids, except that it also has sensors embedded in it to measure the health of the child.
The sensors that will be included in the teddy are configurable, depending on the parents’ need, but can include things like heart rate monitor, glucose levels, blood flow and temperature, among others.
CTRLio
CTRLio is another startup looking to crack the personal data market. However, unlike other companies’ use of personal data for their businesses, Ctrlio is looking to put the end-user back in control by aggregating its users accessible public information and providing it for them in one easy to view and control place.
Of course, this isn’t a benevloent act on Ctrlio’s part; it’s hoping that by collecting together publicly accessible information and then giving the option to users about whether they want to share it with specific companies, it can help crack the marketing world by delivering far more relevant advertising and promotional offers.
This online profile of information can also be used to personalize other services like search, providing they support the plugging in of your CTRLio account.
➤ CTRLio
Stamplay
Stamplay describes itself as a marketing technology ecosystem, which essentially means it provides a suite of tools for marketers. Focused on delivering posts to social media, data around social media activity and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings for executing campaigns.
While it’s by no means the first to offer such a toolset, it does it in a simple to set-up and straight-forward way in which users can quickly choose which cloud services they want to integrate into their ecosystem just by clicking a few buttons.
To date, Stamplay has raised $150, 000 in funding.
➤ Stamplay
Hype
Hype is another local guide-cum activity recommendation platform, currently focusing its efforts on London – in particular, Shoreditch – although it has aspirations of expansion.
Launching in Shoreditch just 5 weeks ago, Hype has been downloaded around 1,500 times and sees around 10 percent of its member base using the app daily.
Rather than simply take an automated listings approach, Hype combines curation, context and real-time data about what’s going on around you to let you know where you should really be heading.
With a successful Seedcamp week, Hype will likely have an uphill struggle on its hands, launching an app to market focused on a very small area of just one city in a market that has already seen a number of other local discovery services launch over the past few years.
➤ Hype
Revision App
As its name suggests Revision App wants to help people revise for their exams. However, rather than simply creating tools and tutorials in various forms (which it has), Revision App wants to go one step further and create new habitual behaviours.
For example, if your child spends 20 minutes staring out of the window of the car on the way to the shops, that’s time that could be spent revising. Naturally, it’s available on the desktop too.
In order to make sure users do actually get something useful and worthwhile out of the platform, all the revision aids have been designed by professional teachers, which should come as some comfort to sceptical parents.
The company said that for some people using its service, grade increases of around 20 percent were possible. It added that of its 700,000 person user base, around 3.5 percent convert from the free to paid packages.
Winnow Solutions
Winnow Solutions is one of the few startups working in an area that genuinely has only one or two competitors doing a similar thing. Ultimately, Winnow is aimed at restaurants and other areas of the hospitality industry that waste a lot of food, with its aim being to drastically cut wastage, and therefore money being thrown in the bin.
If you think of it a bit like a smart meter for the kitchen, but one that measures food wastage rather than energy usage, you end up with a breakdown of exactly how much food is wasted and various other stats. Over time, businesses can then see what they need less of in order to waste less.
The system works by asking for a few bits of info to be entered before things are thrown away in order to keep accurate tabs on the wastage. At its first trial site, Winnow says food wastage has already been reduced by 50 percent.
Saberr
Saberr is a startup that focuses on helping investors and accelerators choose the right teams through what it calls “workforce design”.
By asking a series of questions (an example of which you can see above) it analyzes things like behavioural patterns, resonance within the team and social intelligence.
While you might be sceptical that a new kind of survey could yield results different to any other survey, Saberr claims that it has successfully predicted the winners of other hackathons and startup events with uncanny accuracy without knowing a single thing about the startups involved. Instead it simply looked at the team dynamics. Impressive.
➤ Saberr
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